Tenant faces lawsuit after paying rent to wrong person for 13 months

An unlucky tenant is being threatened with a lawsuit after she paid rent to the wrong person for 13 months without realizing it.

Kody Lynn, who goes by ‘lizzywithaglizzy‘ online, took to her TikTok account to share with viewers how she ended up with an angry landlord claiming she owed $18,508 of rent.

Kody had been using Venmo to send all rent payments for over a year, including her security deposit, only to find out her landlord had never received a single cent.

For the entire 13 months, the person Kody had been sending money to never spoke up about the regular payments they were receiving, and her landlord “never realized” that no rent had come through. That is until now.

Tenant pays over $18,000 rent to wrong person

Having never met the owner prior to acquiring her apartment, Kody arranged all her payments with the property manager. However, she claimed she got one letter wrong on Venmo when sending her initial deposit and two weeks’ rent.

No one noticed and Kody was given the keys to her place, continuing to regularly send money to the same Venmo account without any sign that anything was wrong. That is until she received a message from her property manager stating a recent check had “bounced”.

Realizing what had happened, Kody went “straight to Venmo” and requested a full refund for her lost money. The man who had received her rent then got in contact to discuss the mixup.

“Basically, their story is that they had relatives who passed away and they thought that these payments had something to do with [that],” Kody explained, adding that her payments had a clear description included and that she didn’t think the man’s story checked out.

He went on to tell Kody that his “heroin addict sister” took the money, but offered Kody a payment plan to return the funds. However, her landlord wasn’t willing to wait.

Despite explaining the situation and offering to pay six months’ lost rent upfront until the rest came in, Kody was told she had 60 days to send the full amount or be evicted.

“Livid” and “horribly offended” by the proposal, Kody reached out to a lawyer before telling her landlord she would move out and pay him the rent in increments whenever it was returned to her. Not happy with this settlement offer, the landlord decided to move forward with a lawsuit.

“That’s fine, I’m in law school, a lawsuit doesn’t scare me. Sue me, we’ll fight this out in court, it’s not going to end well for either of us,” Kody said. “I have an attorney now, it’s my dad, my dad’s an attorney.”

“I would love to not get sued, I would love to not have to go to court,” she continued, before joking that the lawsuit would be “great practice” for her “future career”.

While Kody has accepted she may likely end up in court against her landlord, viewers were not convinced that the entire situation wasn’t an elaborate scam.

“The ‘wrong person’ might be a relative of his!” one person suggested, adding that “no landlord would not realize that they did not collect rent from a tenant” and that things seemed “shady”.

Another agreed, stating: “I feel like they were scamming you. How could they not check they got the security deposit before letting you move in?”

“IF the property manager or Owner NEVER RECEIVED your deposit and first month’s rent, they would have NEVER given you the keys.”